Palm Beach Gardens Florida Hurricane Michael

Rick Taylor got the call Saturday at 11 p.m.  and by 2 a.m. the West Palm Beach Fire Rescue Department training chief was headed for the Panhandle with a convoy of 22 firefighters from West Palm, Delray Beach, Boca Raton, Palm Beach and Palm Beach County.

The team joined dozens of town, city and Palm Beach County personnel in a massive deployment to help dig out battered communities in Florida's Panhandle, where Hurricane Michael's 155-mile-per-hour wind and wash last Wednesday splintered homes and businesses from Mexico Beach to Mariana and beyond. The effort was part of a wide-scale mobilization of human and mechanical resources from counties throughout Florida and nearby states, working both alongside and independently from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Brent Bloomfield, West Palm Fire Rescue's emergency operations chief, was deployed the morning after landfall along with two West Palm experts trained in urban search and rescue, brothers Bryan and Brandon Bartlett.

READ: What titled Hurricane Michael's path away from South Florida?

Monday, five days after the storm hit, a line of trucks left West Palm's fleet maintenance yard, with water utility technicians, backhoes, two Bobcats, three generators and a powerful pump, charged with helping revive the Panhandle's broken water and sewage treatment plants and pipelines. Among the 24 city staffers aboard: support crews to change the flat tires the trucks were sure to suffer in crunching over storm debris.

Smaller towns and villages also pitched in.

- Palm Beach Gardens got a call from the state Emergency Operations Center on Monday night and by Tuesday morning two of the city's 9-1-1 dispatchers were dispatched northbound, to relieve exhausted Panhandle staffers.

- Wellington's Firefighter of the Year, Capt. Robert Dawson, was sent to the Panhandle. Wellington's Emergency Management Director, meanwhile, Nicole Coates, left on assignment with the Florida Region 7 All Hazards Incident Management Team, for which she is deputy planning section chief. The group collects and evaluates storm information and develops plans to assign duties to recovery field crews.

- Staffing shortages and upcoming events left Tequesta too short-handed to send personnel but the village responded to a request from the Escambia County Sheriff's Office to supply them and the Bay County Sheriff's Office and neighboring police departments with "gently used uniforms," village spokesperson Lori McWilliams said. "They have been working around the clock and several deputies and officers have sustained damage to their homes and departments (and uniforms). They have requested unwanted uniforms and work boots. Mannos Public Safety supply is collecting the items and will sew on generic Sheriff/Police patches as a temporary fix."

On Tuesday, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office tweeted that one of its search K9s had found a man's body and that its drone unit had located another body.

Taylor said his group, with about five fire engines, was sent to Jackson County, 60 miles north of Panama City, on a search and rescue mission. Taylor said the damage  he saw and heard of from others reminded him of Marathon, where he worked on hurricane recovery last year. It was hard getting fire engines into the storm damaged areas near Marianna, Jackson County's capital, he said.

In upper-80-degree temperatures and high humidity, the crews are going door-to-door, checking on residents, transporting those with medical issues, clearing side streets.

"In 25 years in the business I work in, it's all gut-wrenching but this is what I do for a living. It is never a joyous occasion," Taylor said.

He has seen homes missing roofs, and trees with 24-inch diameters across roads, or, twice as dangerously, suspended in utility wires, he said.

The team spends nights on cots in the public services building of Chipola College in Marianna, with food delivered from a large kitchen in a neighboring county.

"I have not seen the mass carnage that's farther south of here," but that doesn't lessen the difficulty factor for responders, he said. "It makes it worse, because people think they can come back. But if you don't have something to come back to, you should stay away" while crews work to make neighborhoods habitable again, he added.

Assistant City Administrator Scott Kelly, who chairs a statewide group that coordinates cities and county utility volunteers, said West Palm is "sending our best folks" with equipment to excavate and repair water mains, and with electrical expertise to get water and sewage plants functioning again.

This is the 10th time the utility group has activated since its founding in 2004, Kelly said. The crews have it easier this time, he said - they'll be sleeping in hotels in Destin. During past deployments, in New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina, for example, they slept in their trucks.

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Source: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/2018/10/16/hurricane-michael-dozens-from-palm-beach-county-join-recovery-push/9511517007/

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